This week, I would like to address a few ways to keep going if you hit the wall. The short answer is to persevere and Fail Up. Do your best not to give in or quit. I know it sounds simplistic (it is) just keep going. Teddy Roosevelt offers a timeless quote that shows the power of perseverance: “I am only an average man, but, by George, I work harder at it than the average man.”

I have found this to be true in my life and also at our company, Fishbowl. After years of continuous struggle, banging my head against the wall of success and failure, and failing at many of my “resolutions,” I ﬁnally broke through to the far side of complexity and arrived at something I never expected to ﬁnd: simplicity. I learned that achieving success doesn’t have to be overly complicated, nor is it wrong to adjust and adapt. But it is imperative to keep inching forward from wherever you stand. I also learned that we can and should lift one another up in life.

This is the secret that helped me identify the greatest trait that allows me to achieve my resolutions: I have learned to Fail Up. To ask myself, what can I learn from this experience and do better for myself and others in the future?

When I fail, I fail big. I allowed my failures to deﬁne, limit, and even incapacitate me for many years. I was not open to the possibility that success in realizing my resolutions is a journey. Failure is an integral and inevitable set of stops in the process, and I simply needed to get back on the right track when I fell off.

When I ﬁnally discovered this secret—when I changed my paradigm—it changed my life. I no longer deﬁne myself or others as failures when we don’t accomplish what we initially set out to do; instead, I recognize and appreciate that there are some areas in our lives we have mastered, other areas we are developing, and far too many areas where we haven’t even scratched the surface yet.

We serve ourselves best by encouraging ourselves to navigate through challenges on our journey. It helps by asking questions like “How do I learn best?” “What could I do better?” and “How can my environment better support me in the future?”

The important thing is to move forward continually. Some days we make great progress in some areas; other days we seem to slide backward a bit. If we were to chart our progress, it would have ups and downs, but overall it should move upward as we learn from our mistakes and failures. This is the heart of Failing Up and tossing aside the “blues.”

There were times when my personal challenges brought me to my knees and broke me to the point I couldn’t even get out of bed. I wanted to throw in the towel because I just didn’t know what else to do. I wanted to give up, but I didn’t. I hope you won’t have to fall as far as I did to learn how high you can bounce back.

We often struggle to see what we can learn from challenges because they seem unfair and impossible to bear while we’re facing them. I will never understand why I lost my son when he was only 25 years old and in the prime of his life. For a long time, I felt like I had failed because I could not ﬁnd a way to help him get better. I also felt lost because I didn’t know how to cope with his absence.

Even if we don’t understand why bad things happen to us, we can Fail Up from them and become better people and build better businesses as a result. My own path hasn’t been an easy journey by any means; but I no longer get the “blues” and get lost in the weeds. I live, learn, and move forward.

My life is far from perfect. But I have learned that if you haven’t experienced failure—or have ignored the lessons inherent in the process—you’re missing out on your most invaluable opportunities for growth. Don’t be afraid to fail—and don’t waste energy trying to cover up failures. Learn from them, and move on to the next challenge. Learn to look for the “gold in them thar hills,” discover the gold in every experience, and leave the “blues” behind.